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Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing. Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientific detective work has uncovered a decades-old glitch in ocean temperature measurements and revealed that the world's seas are warming and rising faster than previously reported. Fellow report author John Church said he had long been suspicious about the historical data because it did not match results from computer models of the world's climate and oceans. "We've realigned the observations and as a result the models agree with the observations much better than previously," said Church, a senior research scientist with the climate centre.

A joint American and European oceanography satellite designed to continue a growing legacy of monitoring changes in sea levels and the impacts on the global climate awaits an overnight blastoff Friday morning from California.

Has An Ocean Circulation Collapse Been Triggered?Geoscientists warn that there can be a considerable delay between the triggering of a collapse of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and the actual collapse. (Credit: iStockphoto/Emmanuelle Combaud) ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2008) — Predictions that the 21st century is safe from major circulation changes in the North Atlantic Ocean may not be as comforting as they seem, according to a Penn State researcher. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that it is very unlikely that the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC) will collapse in the 21st century. They predict a probability...

New evidence supports premise that Earth produces endless supply ------------------ A study published in Science Magazine today presents new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil, which asserts oil is a natural product the Earth generates constantly rather than a "fossil fuel" derived from decaying ancient forests and dead dinosaurs. The lead scientist on the study – Giora Proskurowski of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle – says the hydrogen-rich fluids venting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Lost City Hydrothermal Field were produced by the abiotic synthesis of...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - In what some scientists see as another alarming consequence of global warming, thousands of Pacific walruses above the Arctic Circle were killed in stampedes earlier this year after the disappearance of sea ice caused them to crowd onto the shoreline in extraordinary numbers. The deaths took place during the late summer and fall on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, which separates Alaska from Russia. "It was a pretty sobering year — tough on walruses," said Joel Garlach-Miller, a walrus expert for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Unlike seals, walruses cannot swim indefinitely. The giant,...

"The battle between science and creationism has reached the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where a former researcher is claiming he was fired because he doesn't believe in evolution. Nathaniel Abraham filed a lawsuit earlier this week in US District Court in Boston saying that the Cape Cod research center dismissed him in 2004 because of his Christian belief that the Bible presents a true account of human creation. Abraham, who is seeking $500,000 in compensation for a violation of his civil rights, says in the suit that he lost his job as a postdoctoral researcher in a biology lab...

A rift that opened in Africa after a massive earthquake last September could be the beginning of a new Ocean, scientists say. The crack in the ground appeared along a fault line in the Afar desert in Ethiopia. The crack is heading for the Red Sea. If it makes it that far, it would carve a new ocean that would separate Eritrea and part of Ethiopia (both of which lie on the Arabian plate) from the rest of the continent, creating a new island.Satellite data collected since the quake shows that the rift is widening at an unprecedented rate, according...

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...

Science Daily — More than a mile beneath the Atlantic's surface, roughly halfway between New York and Portugal, seawater rushing through the narrow gullies of an underwater mountain range much as winds gust between a city's tall buildings is generating one of the most turbulent areas ever observed in the deep ocean. In fact, the turbulence packs an energy wallop equal to about five million watts -- comparable to output from a small nuclear reactor, according to a landmark study led by Florida State University researcher Louis St. Laurent and described in the August 9 edition of the journal Nature....

A drill will be used to extract samples of the exposed mantle Scientists are to sail to the mid-Atlantic to examine a massive "open wound" on the Earth's surface.Dr Chris MacLeod, from Cardiff University, said the Earth's crust appeared to be completely missing in an area thousands of kilometres across. The hole in the crust is midway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The team will survey the area, up to 5km (3 miles) under the surface, from ocean research vessel RRS James Cook. The ship is on its inaugural voyage after being...

New Zealand fishermen may have caught the largest Colossal squid ever found -- weighing around 450kg (992 pounds) and with rings the size of tires.The adult Colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was caught by fishermen long lining for toothfish in deep ocean off Antarctica, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said on Thursday in announcing the catch.The squid was still alive when caught and was eating a hooked toothfish when hauled aboard, Anderton said in a statement."The squid was almost dead when it reached the surface, and the careful work of the crew was paramount in getting this specimen aboard in...

THE Red Sea is parting in a way that could create a new ocean basin and redraw the map of Africa and Arabia. A huge rift that appeared last year along a fault in the Afar desert in Ethiopia, where the African and Arabian tectonic plates meet, has provided the strongest indication yet of how the plates are separating to create a new sea. Geologists believe that they are witnessing a tectonic process similar to the one that formed the Atlantic Ocean, as adjacent plates push apart over millions of years to alter the shape of the continents. While the...

LONDON (Reuters) - Japanese scientists have taken the first photographs of one of the most mysterious creatures in the deep ocean -- the giant squid. Until now the only information about the behavior of the creatures which measure up to 18 meters (59 feet) in length has been based on dead or dying squid washed up on shore or captured in commercial fishing nets. But Tsunemi Kubodera, of the National Science Museum, and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association, both in Tokyo have captured the first images of Architeuthis attacking bait 900 meters (yards) below the surface in...

Think of it as the Mars Rover but at the bottom of the ocean, remotely exploring our own planet's most alien landscape for scientists back at mission control. "This is how the science is going to be done," said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer. In 2000, Kelley led an expedition using a manned submersible to explore the deep Atlantic Ocean. Her team stumbled upon something never seen before. The researchers discovered a startlingly massive collection of limestone towers located miles away from the tectonic "spreading" cracks in the seafloor that typically produce such structures. Some of these hydrothermal...

Octopus seen walking on two legs like a human   VIDEO   By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Octopuses, known for using camouflage to avoid predators, have been observed apparently trying to sneak away by walking on two arms while pretending to be a bunch of algae. Two kinds of octopus were seen to use different ways of walking along the sea floor, researchers were reporting in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The movements were discovered by Christine L. Huffard of the University of California, Berkeley, who was studying underwater video camera tapes of the...

UK scientists have released images of the ocean floor near the epicentre of December's giant Asian earthquake. They were obtained by the Royal Navy's hydrographic survey ship HMS Scott. The three-dimensional pictures detail the deformed seabed 150km (94 miles) off the Sumatran coast, and reveal huge underwater landslides. Researchers involved in the project believe the images may help in the design of the tsunami early warning system to be built in the region. "There are features which we would think are something like the Grand Canyon would look," Tim Henstock, one of the scientists on board HMS Scott, told BBC...

SINGAPORE (DPA): A U.S. Navy vessel is surveying the seabed in the Malacca Straits' shipping lanes off Indonesia's Aceh province to determine if there have been any depth changes from the massive earthquake and tsunami, a published report said on Wednesday. No problems have been reported so far by the nearly 4,000 commercial ships that have transited the straits since the Dec. 26 tsunami, which devastated coastal communities from Malaysia to Somalia. A warning to mariners from the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA), published in The BusinessTimes, said, "Major changes have likely occurred in the topography of the coastline and...

WASHINGTON - A new deep-sea research vessel will be able to carry people to 99 percent of the ocean floor, diving deeper than the famed Alvin that pioneered the study of seafloor vents, plate tectonics and deep ocean creatures over the past 40 years. The new American submersible will provide the tools to reach "not for the stars but for the depths," Robert Gagosian, president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said Friday at a briefing at the National Science Foundation (news - web sites). France, Russia and Japan also operate deep sea research vessels and China is building one,...

Description: Geochemists have uncovered evidence that Earth's ancient oceans were much different from today's. New data shows that Earth's life-giving oceans contained less oxygen than today's and could have been nearly devoid of oxygen for a billion years longer than previously thought.Newswise — As two rovers scour Mars for signs of water and the precursors of life, geochemists have uncovered evidence that Earth's ancient oceans were much different from today's. The research, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, cites new data that shows that Earth's life-giving oceans contained less oxygen than today's and could have been nearly...

Ocean Studies May Be Heading to Space By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer SEATTLE - The skills and technology used to explore the extreme depths of the Earth's oceans will soon find work in outer space. Scientists are making plans to probe the icy seas of Jupiter's moons and drop a lander to the bizarre gasoline-like lakes of Titan, a moon of Saturn. "The possibilities of studying the extraterrestrial oceans in the solar system is now real," said Torrence Johnson, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Johnson, speaking Saturday at the national meeting of the American Association for the...

Do abrupt climate shifts occur as part of a natural cycle? Despite growing evidence that humans affect climate via urbanization and greenhouse gas emissions, the natural climate cycle may have the final say. Research from Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf at Germany`s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggests that the earth`s climate is characterized by an extraordinarily regular cycle of about 1470 years. He found that the five most recent cycles had a standard deviation of only 32 years. Rahmstorf examined ice cores from Greenland. Going back before the 20th century, when weather stations were nonexistent or widely dispersed, ice cores...

hat started as a hunch is now illuminating the origins of life. A few years back, Dr. Derek R. Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts found that a few kinds of bacteria used iron as a means of respiration (just as humans use oxygen to burn food) and that a surprising but common byproduct of this form of microbial breathing was magnetite, a hard black magnetic mineral. The scientists wondered if hidden swarms of microbes might account for the vast deposits of magnetite that dot the earth and sea. So they turned to one of the strangest, most...

Report: Coral Reefs Dying OffPollution, overfishing and climate change have severely damaged one-third of the world's coral reefs and could destroy another third in the next 30 years, scientists warned Thursday. "There are no pristine reefs left," the researchers reported in the journal Science. They predicted that without "radical changes" in efforts to save the world's reefs, "close to 60 percent of them could be lost by 2030." The report -- based on hundreds of historical documents, fishing records and scientific studies using sources as diverse as early ship's logs to modern environmental surveys -- is the most comprehensive...

Watery grave awaits famous vessel in dispute over its future For 40 years it was the mythical flagship of that most emblematic - and heavily-accented - of Frenchmen, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. Under his command it sailed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Antarctic, the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangtze, revealing their murky secrets to captivated television viewers around the world. Now the Calypso, its superstructure riddled with rust and its timbers rotten, languishes unrecognised and all but unrecognisable in the dock of La Rochelle's maritime museum, as a legal wrangle threatens to send it to the place...

Scientists have identified a region of the sea floor whose depth rivals that of the Challenger Deep which, at about 11,000 metres (36,000 feet), is the lowest spot on Earth. The new location lies 200 kilometres (124 miles) further to the east, along the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. It was found during a sonar sea-floor mapping project carried out in 1997 and 2001 by scientists from Hawaii, US. The Challenger Deep has been visited by a number of manned and unmanned submersibles since its discovery, but at present there is no craft in operation that can survive the...

BOSTON - Being thrown from a container ship, drifting for more than a decade, bobbing through three oceans — it's enough to turn a rubber duckie white.   A floating flock of the bathtub toys — along with beavers, turtles and frogs — is believed to be washing ashore somewhere along the New England coast, bleached and battered from a trans-Arctic journey. Oceanographers say the trip has taught them valuable lessons about the ocean's currents. The toys have been adrift since 29,000 of them fell from a storm-tossed container ship en route from China to Seattle more than 11 years...

<p>SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) --Chilean scientists were baffled on Tuesday by a huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on the southern Pacific coast and were seeking international help identifying the mystery specimen.</p> <p>The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-meter) mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate.</p>

World's Deepest-Diving Submarine Missing Tuesday July 1, 2003 12:49 AM By HANS GREIMEL Associated Press Writer TOKYO (AP) - The world's deepest-diving submarine has disappeared in the choppy Pacific Ocean off Japan, a setback to deep-sea research on everything from earthquakes to rare bacteria. Kaiko, a bright yellow submarine which entered the record books in 1995 by diving 36,008 feet to the bottom of the Challenger Deep - the ocean's deepest point - snapped its tether as a typhoon approached in late May and has been missing since then, officials said Monday. Daniel J. Fornari, chief scientist for deep submergence...

Glacier Melting in Alaska IncreasingWASHINGTON (AP) -- Alaska's major glaciers are eroding so rapidly that researchers estimate they are losing 24 cubic miles of ice each year, adding to the steady rise in global sea level. In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, University of Alaska researchers said a survey of 67 major glaciers using an airborne laser system found that the rate of melting has hastened over the past five years. ``From the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, the glaciers lost about 52 cubic kilometers (13 cubic miles) a year,'' said Anthony A. Arendt, first author of...

Oceanographer to Receive National Medal of Science SAN DIEGO, California, May 13, 2002 (ENS) - President George W. Bush has selected Charles David Keeling, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, to receive the National Medal of Science. The National Medal of Science is the nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in scientific research. In its awards announcement, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which administers the National Medals of Science for the White House, noted that Keeling "pioneered studies on the impact of the carbon cycle to changes in climate,...